Four hours after my earlier post on the possibility of a 2009 election, I flinched on reading evening newspaper billboards in central London saying: "Go for June 4, Allies Tell Brown" or words to that effect. Wrong again, Mike?
Not on this occasion. A few minutes later, I received a text from a friend who usually knows what's going on behind the big black door. Had I just heard Gordon Brown on Radio 2's Jeremy Vine show? (No). "He's just responded to your blog and killed off this election speculation nonsense."
Well, that's nice, if a bit misleading. People as busy as Gordon Brown don't have time to read newspapers much (it's usually a bad idea in their shoes), let alone blogs: they have people who monitor media for them.
But challenged by Vine about tonight's Evening Standard report that he is "seriously considering" an election on June 4 2009, Brown – who must have been expecting the question – replied:
"My undivided attention is on the economy. I am not thinking about anything else. It is 100% of my attention, and you can just discount all of these stories."
That ought to be enough, after all, there's only one person in the country who takes this particular lonely decision: the prime minister of the day.
But no, this afternoon's Press Association account of the Vine interview begins: "Prime minister Gordon Brown today tried to put a lid on speculation about a spring general election, insisting that reports he was considering going to the polls in June could be discounted..."
"Tried" eh? It only serves to remind wary readers, listeners and viewers that we media ruffians hates to shut down election speculation. It's like having to mothball a profitable factory for two months because there's insufficient demand to keep it open.
Footnote: it's not that Brown can't read blogs or the internet in general. He's not the techno-illiterate Tony Blair was until after he left office (he's still nothing special). In No 10 Blair was a hand-written-notes-and-faxing man to the end.
How do I know? Because I said to a minister I encountered this week that Barack Obama would be the first IT literate US president: they've had to confiscate his BlackBerry on security grounds.
To which my minister replied that Gordon is the first IT literate prime minister. He can do email and texting, surf the net, call up photos and articles - and many others things the minister rattled off so quickly I can't remember them.
Just in case you're wondering, I'm pretty sure it didn't include touching up the government's economic forecasts in Photoshop. Hence the long slog towards 2010.
